Category: b2bmarketing

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b2bmarketing cmo hiring

Unlocking the C-Suite: Essential Steps to Transition from VP of Marketing to CMO

To become a CMO, you need:

1️⃣ Some years of experience as a VP of Marketing

2️⃣ Your results at multiple companies are consistently solid

3️⃣ The items in the 2x VP of Marketing are a must-have now. In case you missed these in the last post, those are:

1. Already been a VP of Marketing at a company with ARR greater than the ARR of the company you’re joining (they want to know you can get to their level; it’s risky to a company if you’ve never worked at their level already)

2. Proven pipeline and revenue results from the last company you worked at

3. Able to speak to specific campaigns end to end

4. Able to give examples of how to solve people management issues

5. Able to put together a solid 90 day and/or 1 year Marketing plan

The one caveat here: I haven’t been a CMO, so the steps to becoming a CMO are based on what I’ve seen and been told.
But let’s be real, being the VP of Marketing at a startup reporting to the CEO or CRO has essentially the same job duties as a CMO at a startup.

Check out previous posts in this series to see other steps needed to advance in other parts of Marketing.

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b2bmarketing customermarketing

8-Step Guide to Crafting Engaging Customer Stories: Our Proven Process Revealed

Our customer story creation process is getting honed in!
Here’s how it works and an example of one:

1. Ask CSMs and Sales for potential customers that would be open to customer stories

2. Search Salesforce for interesting customers (and with strong usage / CSAT)

3. Get intros to customers and ask if they’re open to doing it (or have CSM/AE ask for you). Show how it’s valuable for their personal brand and for their company.

4. If they agree, send them questions in advance. Schedule a time for a video interview. 

5. Draft a written customer story from the video interview and also create a video version or audiogram version.

6. Send for their review & approval.

7. Assuming it’s good, publish and promote.

8. Optional but suggested: Repurpose the content. Turn it into educational paid social ads, social posts, use snippets in other content, etc.

Example: Stephanie Ogozaly created a recent customer story with Groupon, and I think it’s super! Big thanks to Aksana Aleksiaichuk Koch, Jack Claeys, and of course Adam Lindsey, our customer superstar, as well! See a link to it in the comments.

What do you think? What would you change? How is your process different?

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b2bmarketing hiring peoplestrategy

5 Essential Steps to Becoming a Successful 2x VP of Marketing: An Insider’s Guide

To become a 2x VP of Marketing, you need 5 things:

1. Already been a VP of Marketing at a company with ARR greater than the ARR of the company you’re joining (they want to know you can get to their level; it’s risky to a company if you’ve never worked at their level already)

2. Proven pipeline and revenue results from the last company you worked at

3. Able to speak to specific campaigns end to end

4. Able to give examples of how to solve people management issues

5. Able to put together a solid 90 day and/or 1 year Marketing plan

Agree/disagree?

Background to this series:
Each level in Marketing builds on the experience of previous levels.
 
My framework assumes you want to manage people and become the general VP of Marketing or CMO; not just a VP/SVP of a specific discipline in Marketing.
Although most of the requirements would be similar.
 
These are not hard & fast rules and it’s geared more toward people working in startups rather than big enterprises.
 
Many people will be exceptions to these in some way in their journey. Nevertheless, hopefully, it can help guide you.

Reminder: Stages I’m showing in this series: Intern, Associate, Manager, Sr. Manager, Director, Sr. Director, VP, 2x VP, CMO.
To see each stage, follow me & click the 🔔 icon on my profile for the next stage posts.

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b2bmarketing creatingdemand

Boost Your LinkedIn Engagement: A Step-by-Step Guide to Collaborative Post Brainstorming

My calendar invitation description I sent today:

Each of you has expressed interest in getting more active on LinkedIn. I thought it could be helpful to have a group meeting where we all block 25 minutes to brainstorm and write LinkedIn posts. 

You’ll write your own individual posts but you can ask others for help or ideas. At the least, we’ll all have camaraderie doing it at the same time.

THE GOAL:
Leave the meeting with at least 2 LinkedIn posts created. 

Then you can post them during the week.

Prep work:
Think about the intended audience for your posts
Think about a few types of topics they’d find relevant and you have knowledge that you can write about. This can be about any topic; it doesn’t have to be about Zingtree or customer support unless you want it to be.

—–
Like the idea? Copy / paste this with your colleagues to help them get started on LinkedIn.

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b2bmarketing hiring interviewing

Unconventional Interviewing Strategies: How a 90-Day Plan and Team Research Can Transform Your Job Hunt

2 pieces of uncommon interviewing advice I gave to a friend yesterday:

1. Create a 90-day plan for what you’d do if you joined, even if they don’t ask you for this.
This helps show initiative and can show you know your stuff, their business, etc. 🌶️Arthur Castillo and John McDevitt shared they have both done this in the past and found success with it.

2. Research who is on the current team. 
That will help you see if you’re backfilling someone or if it’s a net new addition to the team. Also see how many are on the team, esp. in your specific discipline. Then position yourself accordingly.

What’s your’s uncommon interview advice?

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b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Unlocking Customer Insight: The Power of ‘How Did You Hear About Us?’ in Marketing Strategy

10 REAL answers to our “How did you hear about us?” form field below 👇

Context: 
Some people write PARAGRAPHS of text giving us amazing qualitative insights – things marketing attribution software alone will never be able to show us.

There is no way Marketing can get these insights from dark social if we don’t have this field. 
Add it as a required free text field, not a dropdown… 

EXAMPLES:

– From web and from friends in other Companies that have used/tested the product

– Linked-In

– Facebook ad

– Referred by Zendesk Support

– Talkdesk AppConnect

– Used it in my last company

– I have been looking for a solution for our Technical Support Operations and Customer Experience team that would centralize data, reduce onboarding and ramp up time, standardize troubleshooting and integrate with existing systems. I went through an extensive search online and found several options but none of them met my expectations. I came across a 58 min and 42 second youtube video, “Getting Started with Zingtree”, hosted by Brad Schieber and Debbie McCormick, that was everything I was looking for and more. That video as well as a dozen or so other videos led me to your free plan which allowed me to get hands on with creating trees. I presented the demo trees to company leadership and my director has asked me to reach out to you to see if we can schedule a demo.

– Previously used Zingtree when employed by [previous company]. Left company for several years after aquisition by [company]. Not sure what happened to Zingtree use in my absence. Would like to demonstrate the value to my boss (DIrector of Global Support) with a proof of concept example. Thanks /[his name]

– I met clinical research md’s who will be using platform for stroke patients. I work for a company running a clinical trial for stroke and would like to know more information.

– Hello, my Name is [name] and I am a [job title] for [company] in Germany. We at [company] are looking for a Salesforce integrated Agent Scripting tool to replace a legacy tool with Salesforce integration. I became aware of Zingtree through my own online research for agent scripting tools with native Salesforce integration. We’d like to get a demo of the agent scripting capabilities of your product. Looking forward to hear from you, [name]

What’s holding you back from adding this field? If you already have it, what do your answers look like?

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b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Unlocking Business Growth: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing OKRs for Effective Demand Creation in Marketing

Steal my OKRs for Creating Demand, and put them in your Marketing plan 👇

Objective 1: Create demand

🚀 Key Result (KR) 1: Launch X groups of ads on LI/FB (integration-specific ads & educational ads). Quant: Reach X people in our target audience. Maintain a X%+ CTR from LI ads. Direct traffic to high-intent pages (home page, pricing page, demo page, customer stories, etc) increases by X%+.

🎯 KR2: Implement & adopt metadata.io’s Metamatch to make our ads even more targeted to our ICP, esp. on FB

✍️ KR3: Grow social engagement: employees & corporate posting regularly. Engagement rate: LI – X% QoQ, TW – X% QoQ. X total posts by ZT employees.

📣 KR4: Zingtree folks get on X podcasts for free

Notes:
1️⃣ We have 5 objectives this quarter, and the other objectives affect creating demand too, but this is the primary one about it.
2️⃣ I’ve taken out our specific numbers so that you can adopt it to your business easily.
3️⃣ Creating demand is very new for us (I’m new to @zingtree), so that’s why my KR1 doesn’t have specific opp or pipeline goals associated with it. It takes some time before we can count on these producing later stage results.

What do your create demand OKRs look like? What would you add/change about mine?

Categories
b2bmarketing customersuccess sales

Unlocking the Impact of Economic Uncertainty on ARR Quotas: A Crowdsourced Insight

How was last quarter for you in achieving ARR quotas (Sales or CX)? Want to see how it was for your peers? Your vote’s answer is visible to no one on LinkedIn except for me as the author. And I will keep it confidential!

In economic uncertainty, it makes it harder to hit quota for most and easier for some. Curious to get a crowdsourced answer for how the economy is affecting most companies.

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b2bmarketing demandgeneration okrs

Strategic Breakdown: Allocating Marketing Efforts for Inbound, Outbound, and Channel Partnerships

CEO: “I need Marketing’s help in supporting other GTM areas like Outbound Sales and Channel Partnerships.”

Me: “Agreed, that’s in our plan.”

CEO: “Great. What % of your time will be focused on each?”

Me: “Let me get back to you on that this week.” Thinking in my head, “😳 I haven’t measured that before…”

Here’s how I came back & answered that question. Plus see my actual %s for each:

Take each KR in my OKRs and
1️⃣ Give it an effort rating (3=High, 2=Medium, 1=Low)
2️⃣ Then distribute 10 points among Inbound, Outbound, & Channel. 
E.g. 6 to inbound, 3 to outbound, 1 to channel.
Use the points system b/c one initiative may help multiple parts of GTM.

3️⃣ Multiply effort X points to get effort-weighted points for each KR
4️⃣ Do this for every KR and sum up the effort-weighted points for Inbound, Outbound, & Channel. 
5️⃣ Get the % of total for each item. E.g. Inbound is 52% of the total effort-weighted points.

➡️ Now go share how much of Marketing’s time is spent generating inbound, supporting Outbound, and supporting Channel.

Here’s a partial example:
My last post talked about 1 of my 5 OKRs. I’ll show you how I gave points to them. 

🚀 Key Result (KR) 1: Launch X groups of ads on LI/FB (integration-specific ads & educational ads). Quant: Reach X people in our target audience. Maintain a X%+ CTR from LI ads. Direct traffic to high-intent pages (home page, pricing page, demo page, customer stories, etc) increases by X%+.
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 6, Points to Outbound: 3, Points to Channel: 1

🎯 KR2: Implement & adopt metadata.io’s Metamatch to make our ads even more targeted to our ICP, esp. on FB
➡️ Effort: 2. Points to Inbound: 8, Points to Outbound: 1, Points to Channel: 1

✍️ KR3: Grow social engagement: employees & corporate posting regularly. Engagement rate: LI – X% QoQ, TW – X% QoQ. X total posts by ZT employees.
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 6, Points to Outbound: 3, Points to Channel: 1

📣 KR4: Zingtree folks get on X podcasts for free
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 8, Points to Outbound: 1, Points to Channel: 1

I did that for all of the OKRs. In the end for the effort-weighted points, I got:
52% Inbound, 24% Outbound, 24% Channel.

What do you think are ideal effort-weighted point % ratios?
Think you can apply this for your personal or team OKRs?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration googleads

Revolutionizing Pipeline Creation: How Cutting Paid Search Spend by 50% Boosted Our Marketing Efficiency

We are cutting our paid search spend by 50% & expecting almost NO impact on pipeline creation.

Why? B/c we’ve found keywords that have never created an opportunity in the last year. It’s likely that these won’t in the future.

Now we can repurpose this budget for more effective initiatives.

For us, that primarily means starting paid social focused on distribution and reach to our whole audience with our key messages.
To move them from:
problem unaware -> problem aware
category unaware -> category aware
solution unaware -> solution aware

What % of your keywords have never produced pipeline? Or do the analysis & report back your findings!